There is a purely
emotional part of the parent-child relationship that is built on
affection and esteem. Parents and children are genetically
geared to love each other, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

But there’s a stage
where parenting becomes a functional role, not just an emotional
role. With infants, the emotional role shows when a mother
demonstrates her love by holding, talking and singing to the child.
The functional role involves feeding, changing diapers and bathing
the baby. One without the other is damaging for the child.
So if she just loved that child but didn’t do the responsible
functional things, that child would be at great risk and would be
harmed and neglected. If she just took care of the functional
things and didn’t show that child any love, it would have long-term
effects on the child’s emotional development. The emotional
and functional parenting roles go hand-in-hand. It’s not
healthy to emphasize one at the cost of the other.

I think as kids grow
older, the parent’s role becomes more functional and less emotional,
which is a hard lesson for parents who want to be their child’s
“best friend.” As parents, they may feel those emotions
inside, but they really have to do more for their child
functionally, and set limits with the child.
Limit setting
is a very healthy function. It’s how kids learn to figure out
what’s safe and what’s not safe. What’s appropriate and what’s
not appropriate. The functional role changes for parents as
the child grows. With a one-year-old, it involves changing
diapers. With an eight-year-old, the functional role involves
getting homework done. With a fifteen-year-old, it involves
enforcing a responsible curfew.

Why You Shouldn’t Make Your Child Your Confidante

I think parents often make the mistake of
making their child their confidante. So when they say, “I want
to be his friend, and I want him to be my friend,” what they’re
really saying is “I want be his confidante.” And that just
does not fit with the functional role of a parent.

It’s a very well-meaning trap that parents fall into. They
want to share with the child how they really feel about their
grandmother. How they really feel about their neighbor.
How they really feel about their teacher. But it’s ineffective
because the child is not morally, emotionally or intellectually
prepared to play that role. If you’re forty years old and you
want a confidante, find another forty-year-old. Find a
fifty-year-old. Find a thirty-five-year old. But don’t
look for a ten-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a five-year-old.

If parents think teachers are in error, they
should keep that to themselves and their peers and deal with the
school directly. If you think the teacher’s an idiot for not
letting your child chew gum in the room, you can be your kid’s “best
friend” and say, “That’s a stupid rule and that teacher’s a jerk.”
Or you can be a functional parent and say, “Boy, I really disliked
that rule when I was in school too. But I had to follow the
rules.” Two different responses. Both responses
empathize with the child, but one makes him a confidante, which is
ineffective. The other teaches him the importance of following
rules. Remember this: if you punch holes in authority figures,
thinking you’re being a confidante with your kid, don’t be surprised
when he disrespects that authority figure. And then if you
give him consequences for that disrespect, he’s going to look at you
as a hypocrite.

When you make your child your confidante, you
are saying that you and the child are co-decision makers. But
the fact is, you and your child are not co-decision makers in any
realistic way. Kids can offer you their opinion.
They can tell you what they like and dislike. But certainly
decisions, especially important ones but even certain minor ones,
have to be made by you, the parent. Kids have to understand
that the family moves as a unit and the adults make the decisions.

I think you can certainly share some things
with a child without turning him into a confidante. One of the
things you can share with a child is the statement, “We can’t afford
that.” It’s a factual statement that explains the limits under
which you must live. What you shouldn’t share with the child
is, ”I don’t know how I’m going to pay the rent this month.”
It’s something that the child is not prepared for, and it develops
in him a way of looking at the world that is unhealthy and not
realistic.

If you have a tendency to treat your child as
a “friend,” you should understand this important interpretation of
friendship: friends are a group of people that have the same notion
about ideas and life. The truth is, children and adults have
very different notions about what they should be doing. They
have entirely different notions about what’s right and wrong.
They have very different notions about what they want to do tonight.
So I think that you need to be a parent to your child and be loving,
caring and responsible. But I think you have to find your
confidantes outside of that family structure.

Don’t Try to Parent Your Child The Way You Wish Your
Parents Had Parented You

Many parents try to raise their child in a
way that they wish their parents had parented them. It sounds
nice on paper, but it just doesn’t work. So if your parents
were distant or rigid with you, or they seemed uncaring to you or
they seemed self-involved to you or they made horrible personal
mistakes and didn’t give you the guidance you needed, you shouldn’t
overcompensate for that by violating parent-child boundaries with
your own child. This can be characterized as a “reaction
formation.” In reaction to deficits you saw in your own
parents, you form a way of parenting that’s not healthy for you or
for your child.

Remember that anything done in a reactionary
way is going have unforeseen consequences. And the biggest
problem with parent-child friendships is all the unforeseen
consequences. Parents tend to look only at the foreseen
consequences. For example, my child will like me more if I’m
his friend. He’ll trust me. Parents don’t look at the
unforeseen consequences, such as, he won’t listen to the word no
because I never used it with him or taught him how to deal with it.

The goal of
adolescence is
individuation -- separation from adults. That means that the
child is going to have his own business, beliefs and rules that he’s
not going to want to share with adults. You need to know that
it’s not a violation of the parent-child relationship for that child
to develop his own set of friends and his own values. Those
friends and values may not be healthy from a parent’s point of view
or an objective observer’s point of view. But it’s the child’s
job to work through that. People who don’t individuate from
their parents in
pre-adolescence and adolescence end up with emotional and social
problems in life.

Many parents see this individuation happening
in their adolescent children and feel abandoned by the child when
they have parented too much in the emotional role and have acted as
the child’s friend. They feel a remarkable sense of loss, and
they compensate for it by blaming the child.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Not Do Their Homework

I want to draw an important distinction for
you here. In the end, you can be your child’s friend — just
not his confidante. The key is having a responsible
friendship with your child.

You know the saying, “Friends don’t let
friends drive drunk?” Well, friends don’t let friends not do
their homework. Friends don’t let friends make excuses for
failure. Friends don’t let friends badmouth the teacher and
defy the rules in the classroom. That’s the type of
friend you need to be to your child. A responsible friend.
And the model of responsible friendship is identical to the model of
responsible parenting.

How to Stop Being Your Child’s Confidante Now

If you’ve “shared” too much with your child
and not set the kind of limits they need, for whatever reason, all
in the name of being your child’s “friend,” you can change to become
more effective. It begins by talking to your child —
about what you’re going to talk about from now on. Say, “I’ve
decided that there are some things I should be talking to other
adults about. So I’m not going to talk to you about them
anymore because I think it hurts our relationship.” You don’t
have to be specific about the subject matter. Just be clear.

Then you need to learn how to respond
differently to your child, not simply demand that the child
communicate differently. For instance, if you and your child
have been talking about what a jerk a certain teacher is for years
and the child brings it up, you can’t simply come out and say,
“Don’t call that teacher a jerk anymore.” Instead, say this:
“I don’t think it helps us to label that teacher. Let’s figure
out how you can handle this situation successfully.” An
irresponsible friend will sit around and badmouth the teacher with
their child. A responsible friend will help their child solve
the problem he’s having with the teacher.

Parents in
divorced families will often both try to be the child’s
confidante, and the child gets stuck painfully in the middle.
The mother’s telling him what the father’s like, what he’s doing and
not doing. The father’s talking about what mom is like, how
crazy she is, how controlling she is. I’ve heard kids in
divorced families say that their mom is “so controlling, she’s
awful. I can’t live with her.” They were just parroting what
the father said to them. The most poisonous thing is that what
the parents are saying might be true to some degree. And the
kid can see it. But he can’t react to it properly because he
doesn’t have the maturity to do it. These parents might point
out defects in the other parent that are accurate. But the way
they point them out — by treating the child as a confidante —
empowers the child to attack them.

So, am I
friendly with my daughter and her friends? Yes. Am I
their friend? No.

If your child is
showing signs of rebellion and many of the traditional solutions you
have tried are not working, you can get help from coaching.
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